NOI, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Nasser, Islam as revolutionary solution, transnational connections

The Nation of Islam, founded by W. D. Fard Muhammad in 1930 as the Temple of Islam in Greater Detroit, was only one of the many Muslim groups established in the interwar period, but it emerged after World War II as the largest single African American Muslim organization, and by the late 1950s it was arguably the most prominent Muslim organization in the United States. [5] Like most other African American Muslim groups, whether Sunni, Ahmadi, or Moorish in religious orientation, the politics of the Nation of Islam linked the struggle for Black dignity, freedom, and self-determination in the United States to the struggles of all people of color abroad, the so-called Dark World. In its rejection of Christianity, racial integration, and other components of liberalism, the Nation of Islam became a radical symbol of anti-Americanism. [6] Unlike many Black radicals who saw an alternative in communism, however, Elijah Muhammad identified Islam as the solution to such problems. 

During the 1950s and 1960s, Nation of Islam members would debate, define, and engender this revolutionary Islam in different ways. At least some members, especially Malcolm X, saw Gamal Abdel Nasser, the revolutionary leader of the United Arab Republic (the combined state of Egypt and Syria), as a model and leader of Islamic moral and political engagement. Like others around the world, many African American Muslims and African American leftists hailed Nasser's weathering of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Some members hung pictures of him in their homes. [7] In 1958, the year during which the UAR was formed and Nasser convened a meeting of the Afro-Asian Conference in Cairo, Elijah Muhammad cabled Nasser to seek his support for the NOI. In words that seem to be crafted by Malcolm X, he urged Nasser to see their movements as branches of the same tree. "Freedom, justice, and equality for all Africans and Asians is of far-reaching importance, not only to you of the East, but also to over 17,000,000 of your long-lost brothers of African-Asian descent here in the West," the cable read.

-Edward E. Curtis IV, Muslim American Politics and the Future of US Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 36-37.